A man, presumed dead, was brought back to life in a medical miracle
Justin Smith, 25, was walking home from a bar when the evening's sub-zero temperatures left him unconscious.
He wasn’t discovered until the following morning where his father found his seemingly lifeless body on the side of a road.
His father Don Smith told local news: ”He was blue his face, he was lifeless. I checked for a pulse, I checked for a heartbeat, there was nothing.”
Justin was found 'lifeless' on the side of an icy road by his father
Emergency services arrived on the scene but weren’t able to detect vital signs of life on the student who had been in the snow for approximately 12 hours.
Mr Smith was rushed in to hospital Lehigh Valley Hospital in Hazleton, Pennsylvania after Dr Gerald Coleman an emergency medicine physician believed there was still hope.
Writing on the hospital website, Dr Coleman said: “You're not dead until you're warm and dead.
The student was rushed in to hospital where a doctor still held out hope he would survive
“Something inside me said I need to give this person a chance.”
The doctor referred to the medical notion that people who are essentially frozen or kept at cold temperatures can be revived and he instructed paramedics to begin CPR - something which carried on for two hours.
Mr Smith’s condition was so severe that a doctor wasn’t even able to take an accurate temperature reading as his body was so cold.
Mr Smith (not pictured) suffered severe frostbite
In hospital, he was hooked up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine to warm and supply oxygen to his blood.
After 90-minutes, his heart was miraculously beating on its own but doctors were concerned about brain damage and severe frostbite.
A month after he was admitted, Mr Smith woke up with no damage to his brain and surrounded by friends and family - but had lost his toes and two fingers thanks to the frostbite.
Dr Coleman added: “We may have witnessed a game changer in modern medicine—medicine moves forward in extraordinary cases.”